Why some people prefer messy desks and others thrive on order

Quick explanation

A familiar scene, two very different reactions

Walk into an office and you can see the split right away. One desk has stacked folders, labeled trays, and a clear patch for a laptop. The next has half-open notebooks, a coffee ring, and a drift of printouts that looks accidental but somehow isn’t. This isn’t one single cultural thing or one “type” of workplace. You can spot it in a Berlin co-working space, a Tokyo studio, or a U.S. university office. The core mechanism is simple: people use their space to reduce the kind of mental effort they personally find most annoying—either the effort of searching for things, or the effort of constantly maintaining a system.

Order reduces uncertainty, mess can reduce friction

Why some people prefer messy desks and others thrive on order

Common misunderstanding

For some people, a tidy desk is a way to keep uncertainty low. If objects always live in fixed locations, the brain doesn’t have to run a search every time. That matters when attention is already stretched, or when mistakes are costly. A clean surface also removes visual “noise,” which can be genuinely distracting for people who are sensitive to it. For them, order isn’t a personality flex. It’s a way to keep the day from feeling like constant interruption.

For others, strict order adds friction. Every object needs a decision: where it belongs, whether it’s still relevant, how it should be labeled. That decision-making costs time and mental energy. A messy desk can be a working buffer, where items stay out because they’re active, not because someone “doesn’t care.” The piles are often a short-term memory aid. The space is doing some of the remembering.

Different jobs create different desk ecosystems

The kind of work matters more than people admit. Someone processing invoices all day benefits from a stable system and quick retrieval. Someone doing early-stage design or writing may be handling half-formed ideas, shifting priorities, and materials that don’t fit into a neat category yet. Their desk becomes a staging area. You can see this in a concrete situation: a journalist on deadline might keep three interview transcripts, a marked-up draft, and a list of calls on the desk at once, because hiding any of it in a drawer creates a chance it will be forgotten.

Time horizon changes everything. Short cycles reward visible, ready-to-grab tools. Long cycles reward archiving. People who “look messy” may actually be optimizing for the next two hours. People who “look organized” may be optimizing for the next two weeks. Neither is automatically better. They’re different answers to “What will I need soon?”

What people usually overlook: memory is tied to location

A detail that gets missed is how much people rely on spatial memory. Some people remember by location: the stapler near the monitor, the form under the blue folder, the note at the edge of the keyboard. When you move things “into their proper place,” you can erase the cues that made the person feel in control. That’s why “helpfully” tidying someone else’s desk sometimes causes real anger. It isn’t just about control. It can feel like losing access to their own mental map.

This also explains why two messy desks can be totally different. One is random, and the person truly can’t find things. The other is clustered: urgent items in one pile, reference material in another, ongoing projects fanned out where they can be scanned at a glance. From the outside, both look like clutter. From the inside, one is a memory system.

Upbringing, stress, and shared spaces change the preference

People’s tolerance for mess shifts with stress and context. When stress is high, some tighten control and clean more because it gives a quick sense of stability. Others go the opposite direction because their attention narrows to the task, and the environment becomes secondary. Upbringing can play a role too, but it varies and is hard to generalize. A person raised in a strict household might crave order as an adult, or reject it. Both happen.

Shared spaces add another layer: a desk is also a social signal. In some offices, a clear desk reads as competence and respect for rules. In other settings, an overloaded desk reads as busyness and creative output. People often adjust unconsciously to match what their team rewards. The preference is real, but the behavior people show at work can be a compromise between what feels natural and what won’t get comments from a manager walking by.